Ronnie Joe "Antsy" McClain has no use for drawing straight lines or staying inside boxes,

This is a former Japanese auto-industry interpreter who got a bigger kick out of meeting Dr. Demento than he would have if he'd won a Grammy Award. So he said.

"I kind of have a strange outlook on life," said McClain, a musician, songwriter, band leader, painter, humorist and rootsy philosopher. "My music is my life. I wanna tell stories that haven't been told in ways they haven't been told.

"I want to write songs where boy-meets-girl, they fall in love and live happily ever after. I want it to be for real. Something different than people hear on the radio."

He's got that covered. McClain, 51, a "late bloomer" who grew up in rural northeastern Ohio cultivating his imagination - and slightly twisted fascination with weirdness - by listening to Dr. Demento (Eugene "Barry" Hansen, 72) on the radio, has crafted a career by playing "what we call rock-slash-R&B. Folkabilly.

"Story-based songs that often are humorous. Not quite always. We do some serious stuff."

McClain, based in Nashville, Tenn., and his roving Trailer Park Troubadours - in this case five musician/friends from Santa Cruz and San Francisco - pull into Tracy's Grand Theatre on Saturday with their fictional Pine View Heights vibe inspired by McClain's upbringing.

Familiarity and practices aren't issues: "We never play a song the same way twice."

For McClain, who learned to play on a used, self-tuned $75 Sears guitar and didn't switch from art and translation to music until he was 31, true love is a "jailbird beauty" meeting a fellow orange-vested inmate on a road-side trash clean-up crew: "The sparks fly."

"Me and my friends would sit in our bedrooms, turn on the radio and listen," McClain said of those teenage Sunday night soirees with Dr. Demento, an irreverent radio DJ who played unconventional records with suitably spooky patter. "We'd just laugh. It was such a weird world he seemed to live in. I pictured his studio as a crazy place with shrunken heads and brains in jars of formaldehyde."

His Grammy-winning equivalent was a winner when he met the disc jockey in his Los Angeles lair: "It was everything I'd imagined. He had the top hat and coat and everything."

Born in Columbus, Ohio, "I just loved to draw," McClain said. "Copying stuff out of Mad and comic books." By 10, he was "winning all the art contests at school. I tried everything" - including designing and selling T-shirts, using a "little" silk-screen machine to print them.

"We lived in a trailer park," McClain said. "It was real slim pickings. I didn't know we were poor. When I grew up, though, I was highly suspicious."

Ronnie became "Antsy" because "my parents couldn't afford Ritalin," he said with a laugh. "I had a lot of energy. I bounced off the walls."

He also taught himself to write songs on guitar - playing totally out of tune- before an astonished friend fixed that.

"Some of my earlier memories of music pertain to family singing gospel," McClain said of reunions held in a church under a "big old tree over a cemetery where we used to run through the gravestones."

He said his church upbringing was a "good foundation" but "I've become much more universalist. My world view has gotten a lot wider as I've gotten a lot older."

He continued painting and drawing while living in Kentucky. After spending a year in Japan, he worked as an interpreter for Japanese auto workers in Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama.

He occupied himself during lonely hotel-room nights by writing songs and filling occasional requests to perform. Finally, at 31, he headed for Nashville, Tenn., and a recording contract that didn't last long. He didn't enjoy co-writing songs, a major aspect of Music City's culture.

McClain kept it simple: "Well, I can sing my own stuff. So I'll see how far it goes. I came to it late. A late bloomer."

In 1999, he played at a fund-raiser for Santa Cruz's KFAT (now KPIG) radio, where his music still is heard. He also feels at home in Winters, where he recorded "Live at the Palms," a double-CD, in 2013, and he "loves" Stockton.

"I started to notice Northern California is a big market," said McClain, married for 30 years to Pollyester with five children. "We play all over, but it's never as good or as sweet as there. The audience is big and always happy.

Though he's enjoying a recent shift into abstract painting, there's not much to interpret during a typical Troubadours mix of music and humor.

"It's not like 'Hee Haw' comedy," he said. "There's more humor and wit rather than 'ha-ha' laughs. We don't put people down. There's no finger-pointing. It's all self-deprecating.

"We want everyone to forget about their troubles for awhile. It's kind of hard to describe. It's like being invited into a trailer park. It's not too heady. It's just a big, fun party you've been invited to. The best party in your life."

Contact Tony Sauro at (209) 546-8267 or tsauro@recordnet.com. Follow him on Twitter @tsaurorecord.